In a study conducted by UCL, the University of Cambridge and MIT, space tourism could have serious and unprecedented ecological consequences.
As billionaires plan to develop tourism in space, scientists are alarmed: the ecological consequences of such ventures could be disastrous.
A threat to the ozone layer
In order to calculate the risks associated with space tourism, the researchers modeled in 3D the environmental costs of launching and returning a rocket. Their results are worrying: the soot from the black carbon used to keep heat in the atmosphere is dangerous for the ozone layer. Soot particles have a much wider impact on the ozone layer than air traffic emissions, although they are regularly compared.
Stratospheric ozone is also threatened by pollutants from solid propellant-powered shuttles, which use a particularly polluting combustion powder propellant when launching the rocket. Debris and the heat released on return to Earth also pose a problem for the conservation of the ozone layer.
An industry that absolutely needs to be regulated
The scientists used data from a sample of 103 rockets as well as projections from Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Blue Origin, three companies seeking to develop space tourism. The results show that after three years of space tourism, the irradiance value (the irradiance in particular responsible for global warming) will have doubled simply because of SpaceX’s kerosene consumption and Virgin Galactic’s fuels.
For now, the impact of space shuttles on the ozone layer is limited, because few rockets regularly cross the stratosphere. However, the waste of soot particles that would be caused by space tourism would come to threaten the restoration of the ozone layer. In a scenario where shuttles were launched daily, or even only once a week, all the work of the Montreal Protocol would be quickly undone. Signed in 1987, it required signatory countries to considerably reduce the use of products harmful to the ozone layer, also called “ODCs” (ozone-depleting chemicals). Thus, scientists are already imploring politicians to severely regulate the space tourism industry.
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Source : CleanTechnica
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